


Help

by Laelaps



Category: Avengers Academy (Comics), Avengers Arena, Runaways (Comics)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-14
Updated: 2021-03-20
Packaged: 2021-03-22 22:34:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30045810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laelaps/pseuds/Laelaps
Summary: Katy had been found out, and was done with subterfuge and covert manipulation. Now Rebecca was awake and had to watch, had to see everything Katy made her do. And not just her, but anyone else foolish enough to fight her with machinery that Katy’s power could control, could turn against them.  Like that poor dead boy’s wrecked Sentinel.Like Chase. His Darkhawk armor was Katy’s now, and Rebecca watched, cold and despairing, as Katy made him kill Nico.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for Avengers Arena. Diverges from canon with issue #10

Being awake was worse.

The other times Katy Bashir took control of her, she turned Rebecca’s consciousness off, putting her into a blank, dreamless sleep while she operated her like a puppet, using her to sabotage and sow mistrust among their fellow hostages. The parts of Rebecca’s brain and body that were metal and cybernetics made her just another piece of tech that Katy’s power could manipulate. Her pet weapon, her Death Locket.

But this was worse. Katy had been found out, and was done with subterfuge and covert manipulation. Now Rebecca was awake and had to watch, had to see everything Katy made her do. And not just her, but anyone else foolish enough to fight her with machinery that Katy’s power could control, could turn against them. Like that poor dead boy’s wrecked Sentinel.

Like Chase. His Darkhawk armor was Katy’s now, and Rebecca watched, cold and despairing, as Katy made him kill Nico.

They stood at the edge of a snow-covered cliff, Nico facing them with her back to the precipice. Katy was angry. The witch had teleported Cammy and the others to safety, somewhere else on Arcade’s island Murderworld, somewhere away from Katy. Before Nico could cast another spell, one of Chase’s energy guns fired, severing her arm, sending it and her Staff over the cliff. Then Katy made him kick Nico, propelling her backwards into the void.

Rebecca gasped, her wordless cry snatched away by the wind.

Katy floated, her feet inches above the snow, to the edge of the cliff. She peered over the drop, her long black hair whipping across her face.

“Locket, be a love and come over here,” Katy said.

Rebecca shivered as she felt tendrils of Katy’s power slide with practiced ease into the non-organic parts of her brain, like infinitely slender roots threading into her consciousness. Her robotic leg swung forward and Rebecca yielded to her command, feet crunching in the snow until she stood next to Katy.

She looked over the cliff edge into a hazy swirl of white mist. Far below, a tiny dark figure like a broken doll. Rebecca felt her breath catch in the frigid air.

“I need your eye.” Katy said.

There was a soft buzz from Rebecca’s cybernetic eye as Katy manipulated it. The figure at the base of the cliff, stark against the snow, seemed to enlarge and sharpen. It was moving. Rebecca watched as Nico crawled, dragging herself slowly over the snow-covered ground.

“Trying to reach her staff and cast a spell.” Katy’s voice was doubled, the chuckle at Rebecca’s side echoed by another inside her mind. Rebecca wanted to look away, but Katy’s control kept her head from moving.

“You’ve got some kind of robo-hearing in there, don’t you?” Katy asked, as invisible fingers rummaged through Rebecca’s mind. “Ah, here we go.”

The sound of the wind grew to a howl for a moment, then dopplered to a hiss. Rebecca could suddenly hear Nico’s voice, faint and echoing as if from the bottom of a well, speak a single word as she stretched out her remaining hand and grasped her Staff:

_“Help.”_

Rebecca felt Katy’s control weaken slightly, just enough for her to turn her head. For a moment, Katy’s face was darkened with a touch of apprehension. It passed, and her thin smile returned.

She snorted a laugh. “I guess she’s a little rusty. Still, you have to give the witch points for not giving up.”

Rebecca’s head snapped back forward and her gun arm raised itself, lining up with Nico’s stilled form.

“Guess we better blast her, though,” Katy said.

A soft moan left Rebecca’s mouth, and she closed her human eye, even though she could still see Nico’s battered body magnified in perfect clarity through her targeting display. Her arm pulsed with mounting energy.

“Oh, wait,” Katy said. Rebecca felt her gun arm power down.

“She’s dead.”

Rebecca swallowed. “H-how do you know?”

“I haven’t been able to gain control of any of Arcade’s weapons or power systems—not yet anyway. But there are tactical display feeds that aren’t shielded as well…” Katy turned away from the cliff edge and began to float back to the hulking figure of her commandeered Sentinel, standing near the edge of the tree line. “He’s got these life meter things for each of us. You know, like in a video game. Nico’s just ran out.”

Rebecca hugged herself, shivering. The cyborg half of her body was unaffected by temperature, but the metal felt even colder than the air at the places where it was fused to her flesh.

“Come along, Locket,” Katy called back over her shoulder. “You too, Chase.”

Rebecca felt her robotic leg jump and turn her about and she quickly wiped a hand across the human side of her face where tears had left a thin film of frost. As she trudged after Katy she glanced over at Chase, silent in the Darkhawk armor, walking alongside her. Rebecca wasn’t sure how the armor worked, whether it was actually part of him or not, but he hadn’t spoken a word since Katy had taken control of him, and Rebecca hoped for his sake that she had shut off his mind before making him kill Nico.

The three of them gathered at the foot of the headless, hacked-together Sentinel. Katy, with her hands on her hips, scrutinized the dense stand of snow-dusted pines behind the robot. Rebecca felt a jolt as her arm switched configuration. A pair of sleek nacelles locked into place over Chase’s shoulders.

“Right,” Katy said. “First, we burn down the forest.”

“ _Burn_ it? But why…?”

“Too much cover. I’m tired of playing hide and seek and Nico could have teleported the others anywhere. So we flush them out. I’m not going to spend weeks looking all over this stupid island for them again.”

“Katy, please…” Rebecca swallowed, trying to force the words out. “Can’t we just…stop?”

Katy glared at her a moment but then her expression softened. She shook her head ruefully. “You don’t get it, do you? You think Arcade will let us just sit his game out? He’ll make us fight or he’ll just straight-up start killing us again, like he did with that Mettle kid. Only one of us can even hope to get of here alive, and I’m going to make sure it’s me.”

She floated downwards, feet sinking into the snow until their eyes were level with each other. She reached out and gently laid her hand on Rebecca’s human shoulder. “Don’t worry, Locket. You’ll be last, and I promise I’ll put you to sleep first.”

Rebecca stared at Katy’s hand for a moment and pulled away from her. Katy’s comforting smile curdled into a smirk. “Besides,” she said, “You really think the others would just welcome us back to the campfire after everything we’ve done?”

“We?” Rebecca shook her head. “You _made_ me attack them!”

Katy sighed. “Really, Locket…if you’re going to keep whining like this, I’m going to have to shut you off again.”

Rebecca felt her human fist clench and she took a deep breath. “Tim!” she shouted at Katy’s amused face. “Fight her! Please!”

Katy rolled her eyes. “I told you, Locket, my idiot brother is gone now. Not buried. _Gone._ ” She tapped the side of her head. “There’s nobody in here but me.”

She turned away from Rebecca and walked to where the Darkhawk armor stood, unmoving as a statue.

“Here. I’ll show you how things are. Why don’t we ask Chase if he’s in a forgiving mood?” Katy rapped her fist against his armored chest. “Alright, you can talk now, Chase. Locket wants to know if everybody can just say bygones. You got any insights you want to share?”

The metal helmet was motionless, but Chase’s voice answered clearly from within: “Yeah. Don’t let go of controlling me for a second, you freakin’ psycho, ‘cause when you do I’m—”

Rebecca thought Katy had cut the armor’s voice control off, but then Katy laughed and she realized he had simply stopped talking. “You’ll what?” Katy sneered. “Come on—don’t keep us in suspense, Chase.”

Wind creaked in the branches above them and Katy’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. She took a step back and began to rise into the air.

Something burst from the cover of the trees, leaping up with a loud hiss to slam bodily into Katy, throwing the both of them into the snow in a tangle of blurred motion.

Rebecca stumbled back with a cry. It was some kind of animal.

No, it was a monster.

Its jaws were latched to Katy’s neck and shoulder and as they tumbled and thrashed, Rebecca saw its legs pedal in a savage flurry of kicks. Snow billowed up in a cloud of white powder around them and Rebecca felt her stomach heave as a streak of bright crimson stained the churning plume.

Something vast slammed into her mind. The force of it made Rebecca drop to her knees in the snow, bludgeoned by the sudden hammer blow to her head and a wave of nausea. Blackness swirled at the edges of her vision, threatening to swallow her into unconsciousness.

Suddenly her muscles and actuators seized and her metal arm jerked up, the gun shuddering as it snapped in fitful mechanical spasms through different configurations.

KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT a voice boomed in her head, impossibly, unbearably loud.

Her gun fired even as her arm lurched, swinging in a wild, uncontrolled arc. The top of a tree exploded into flames, sending a shower of snow and burning branches down on top of the struggling figures. The tendrils that had probed her brain with surgical precision before now pummeled and flailed in desperate panic for control of her body. Even as they grew more frenzied, Rebecca could feel the filaments weakening, scrambling for purchase. The gun fired again, missing the creature once more and sending an explosion of snow and dirt into the air.

It was madness, Rebecca thought. Even if she hit the monster it would surely kill Katy as well.

She managed to turn her head for a moment toward Chase. The Darkhawk armor’s wings snapped out and then closed again as he staggered backwards, collapsing stiffly against a tree. Katy was trying to control him as well, and failing.

She was dying. Rebecca felt the last feeble tendrils of Katy’s mind crumbling and falling away from her own.

Rebecca watched numbly as the animal shook Katy like a dog playing with a rag doll. Rebecca could see now that the beast was some kind of small dinosaur. The fact seemed come to her with numb, ridiculous uselessness. Finally, it let Katy’s limp body slip from its jaws.

The creature raised its head and looked at Rebecca, its muzzle dappled with blood. Its huge red eyes blinked once and then it began to walk toward her, picking its feet up with bird-like deliberation as it crunched through the snow.

Rebecca tried to raise her gun arm, but her cyborg limbs felt leaden and paralyzed now that Katy’s command was gone. She watched with stunned despair as the dinosaur stalked closer, its eyes locked on her.

“LACE!”

The animal froze and whipped its head towards Chase. The Darkhawk armor had been absorbed and he was once again only carrying the gauntlets he had back on their first day in Murderworld. He held his metal hands open at his sides.

“Aren’t you gonna say hello, girl?”

With an excited squawk, the dinosaur bounded toward Chase. Rebecca cried out as it leapt on him, but Chase was laughing as the animal knocked him onto his back in the snow, its wedge-shaped head nuzzling against his neck and face.

“Okay, okay Dino! Calm down!” Chase shouted over the dinosaur’s harsh trills. He managed to roll out from under it and scramble to his feet, brushing snow from his pants as the creature rocked eagerly from side to side next to him. Chase casually looped an arm around the creature’s neck and glanced over at Rebecca, who stared at the two of them in dumbfounded astonishment.

“So, yeah…” Chase said with a wide grin. “She’s with me.”


	2. Chapter 2

The battered, decapitated Sentinel was just an inert statue now without Katy’s power to control it, but she had provisioned it with rations hoarded from one of Arcade’s supply drops. Chase activated the Darkhawk armor again and soared up, disappearing into the opening at the top.

Rebecca stared up at the looming hulk, shielding her eyes even though the sun was only a hazy smear in the overcast sky. There was a sudden, loud snort way too close to her side and she stifled a shriek, freezing in place as the dinosaur’s snout pressed up against her, its huge nostrils flaring.

“O-okay,” Rebecca managed to get out through a petrified grin. “Good…um, girl.” She reached out a trembling hand and lightly brushed her fingers across its scaly head.

Chase glided down from the Sentinel, hovering a moment before dropping a large duffel bag and two backpacks to the ground. “I got good news if you like freeze-dried army chow and canned beans,” he said as he landed. He switched the armor off. “Hey, great—looks like you two are getting along. She’s a good judge of character.”

“I thought…” Rebecca warily eyed the animal. “At first I thought it was that boy…the one who can turn himself into dinosaurs.”

“That Reptilicus kid? “ Chase seemed insulted. “Nah, Old Lace is just a plain ol’ genetically engineered dinosaur from the future, aren’t you girl?” He scratched under her chin and then looked thoughtful for a moment. “What I don’t get is what she’s doing here.”

“Maybe Arcade kidnapped her too?”

“Maybe. But she wasn’t here before. Me and Old Lace have like a psychic whatchamacallit…a link. I would’ve known if she was on the island.”

“Nico!” Rebecca instantly felt embarrassed for her excitement and looked down at her feet. “Before she… She said ‘Help’. She was holding her staff…”

“Yeah. A spell…” Chase nodded, staring back at the cliff. “It could’ve been a spell.”

“But I thought she said she couldn’t teleport anything in or out of here,” Rebecca said.

“Her Staff…the way she calls it, she has to cut herself.” Chase unzipped the duffel bag and began transferring food into the backpacks. “It’s something to do with blood and magic. I don’t know—I never understood all that occult stuff, but maybe what happened to her…maybe it like, boosted her power or something, for a second. And it was enough for her to punch through whatever force field Arcade has around this place.”

He sighed and ran a gauntleted hand down the dinosaur’s neck. “I’m sorry you got roped into this mess, Lace…but I’m glad the old team’s back together.”

The dinosaur made a low rumbling growl and Chase frowned, looking past Rebecca. “What the hell?” Rebecca spun around.

Two silvery, elongated spheres floated silently in the air above Katy’s body, long spidery arms moving beneath them. They maneuvered something on the ground and then hoisted it up. The body bag drooped heavily between them as they glided silently away.

“Huh,” said Chase, laying a hand on Old Lace to restrain her. “Must be the clean-up crew.”

Rebecca felt an overwhelming surge of outrage and stepped toward the retreating spheres. “Hey!” she shouted, raising her gun arm. “Stop!!”

The robots didn’t slow, but angular projections that looked suspiciously gun-like unfolded from their smooth upper surfaces, pointing back directly at Rebecca.

Chase grabbed her elbow. “Whoa, Tex, you really want to get into a shoot-out over this?”

“But we can’t just let them  _ take _ her!” she said desperately. “What does Arcade want with her…body?”

“Hey, look, I don’t really  _ care _ ! Maybe he’s going to give her a dignified—” Chase broke off, a stunned expression on his face. “Son of a bitch!” he hissed. He bolted, running toward the cliff edge, the dinosaur following at a gallop.

They were standing at the precipice when Rebecca caught up with them, Chase anxiously scanning the valley floor below. “I don’t see any of ‘em down there, do you?” he panted.

The swirling mist of snow had lessened and Rebecca could see Nico’s body clearly with her human eye, stark black against the white ground. “No…” Rebecca said, slowly surveying the surrounding area for more of the small robots.

At the edge of her vision she saw a flash of movement and she quickly magnified the feed through her cybernetic eye. “There!” she shouted, pointing down and off into the far end of the valley. Two more silvery orbs glided between the trees, leisurely making their way towards Nico’s body.

Rebecca wasn’t sure if Chase could even see them with his unaugmented eyes, but he shook his head grimly. “Hell no…” he whispered. He was enveloped in a flash of light and was suddenly encased in the Darkhawk armor again, his wings snapping open with a metallic hiss.

“Wait!” Rebecca grabbed his arm before he could launch himself off the cliff. “They’ve stopped…”

“Yeah. I can see ‘em now. What are they doing?”

Rebecca shook her head. “I don’t know. They’re just floating—” She gasped as the robots abruptly shot like bullets back the way they had come, twin blurs that disappeared into the hazy depths of the forest.

“Whoa,” Chase said. “You don’t think we scared ‘em off, do you?”

She threw him a dubious look. “I think it was more like they got…called back or something.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Chase said. The unreadable metal helmet turned toward her. “Okay, so I was full of crap about letting those robot things make off with Katy, no matter what she did to us. It’s just…” He stopped for a moment, turning back to the precipice. “I can’t let them take Nico.”

Rebecca nodded, even though he was no longer looking at her.

“We need to get down there,” Chase said. “So I can bury her.”

“Okay.” Rebecca pointed to the right. “I think maybe if we follow along the cliff this way, we can work our way down and then back to her.”

“Sure. Or…” Chase gave a small chuckle, “…I was thinking of something a little faster.”


	3. Chapter 3

He flew them down, one at a time. Rebecca kept her eye closed all the way. The dinosaur looked like it hated it even more than she did, making miserable whining sounds and curling its tail up under its belly like a frightened dog.

Chase blasted a hole into the ground, the thin covering of snow evaporating in a cloud of steam. He switched the armor off and knelt by Nico’s head. Gently, he turned her over, her fingers slipping away from the broken Staff as if reluctant to release their grip. 

“Geez,” he whispered. He brushed snow and dirt from her face. He didn’t say anything for several moments and then looked up at Rebecca. “Can you…can you help me?”

Rebecca nodded. Chase lifted Nico by the shoulders, Rebecca carried her by her legs and they laid her in the grave. Rebecca was glad that it was Chase who walked several feet away and recovered Nico’s severed arm, placing it next to her body. Trying to help, Rebecca bent to pick up the Staff.

“No!” Chase shouted. She jumped back in alarm as he ran up to her.

“Sorry.” He nodded toward the Staff. “It’s just…that thing can be way dangerous.” He gingerly picked up the broken halves of the Staff and laid them in Nico’s grave. They pushed the dirt back over her, both of them grimy and breathing hard by the time they were finished. The dinosaur just watched them with what Rebecca could swear was an expression of wretched sadness.

Chase ran his gauntleted fingers through his hair. “She was Catholic…” He looked up at Rebecca with a half-smile. “Yeah, I know, a Catholic witch, right? Anyway, I pretty much suck at this stuff. Do you know any, like…prayers or something?”

Rebecca looked at him blankly and swallowed. Her family had never been religious—only going to church for the occasional wedding. She searched her mind frantically for something that would help, but all she could think of was old movies with a priest saying “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.” She couldn’t remember any of the rest of it, so she shook her head and looked down at the mounded dirt, feeling useless.

They stood over the grave for several minutes. A low rumble of distant thunder broke the silence and the three of them stared off into the distance. Flashes of light flickered at the horizon, briefly illuminating the undersides of the clouds.

“Great,” Chase said. “Arcade’s playing with the weather again.”

“It seems way over on the other side of the island,” Rebecca said hopefully.

Chase lifted up the backpack and swung it over his shoulder. “Guess we better find someplace warmer to camp for the night…”

They headed away from the base of the cliff, through a stand of evergreens that marked the edge of the valley, the thin snow under their feet gradually disappearing, changing to a carpet of pine needles. As they passed through the unmarked borders between Murderworld’s micro-climates the pines gave way to more temperate trees. An hour later, they found a clearing and made camp under a darkening sky.

Rebecca was sure that under normal circumstances she would have been appalled at the texture and bland flavor of the food they heated over their campfire, but she discovered she was ravenous and wolfed her portion down as quickly as Chase and his dinosaur did.

They hadn’t spoken much since burying Nico. Rebecca didn’t know exactly what Chase’s relationship with her was—Katy had said that they were in some kind of superhero team in Los Angeles, back when they had all first met—but she felt she would be intruding on his mourning to ask him about it.

Rebecca watched him as he scraped a last bit of meat from the bottom of the can and tossed it for Lace to snap out of the air. She cleared her throat. “Have you thought about what we should do…I mean, tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” Chase said. “I’m done playing along with Arcade’s stupid Hunger Games rip-off. Me and Lace are gonna go find him and finish this.”

Rebecca gaped at him, incredulous. “You’re an idiot!” she sputtered.

Chase and the dinosaur both looked at her, Chase scowling. Rebecca felt a blush on the human side of her face and hoped the night and the smoke from the fire obscured it. She gulped and plunged on: “Arcade’s too powerful! You know that! And unless your dinosaur has hidden superpowers you haven’t told me about you’ll just both get killed!”

Old Lace turned to Chase, making an inquisitive chirp as she did. Chase’s glare smoldered. The silence drew out to an uncomfortable length.

Rebecca risked a sliver of a smile. “Besides, your whole ‘quitting the game and going after the boss guy’? That pretty much  _ is _ the plot of the Hunger Games.”

“Oh…” Chase looked contemplative for a moment. “I only saw part of the first movie.” He tossed a stick into the fire. “So what do you think we should do?”

“Find out where Nico teleported the others. Once we’re together, we can  _ all _ decide what to do.”

“Those guys.” Chase grumbled. “Those Academy kids are sorta okay, but those Limeys… Axe-dude’s got serious anger management issues and his little buddy’s a jerk. And I don’t trust that fish chick at all.”

“But that’s just what Arcade wants,” Rebecca said. “He wants us mistrusting each other so much that one of us becomes another Katy and gives him his stupid show!”

Chase didn’t reply, just scowling intently into the flickering campfire. Finally he snorted and looked up, shaking his head. “Yeah, okay,” he said, with a rueful smirk. “Guess I’ve gotten too used to taking marching orders from super-powered girls. We’ll find the others first. But when we do, I’m still voting for taking Arcade down.”

Rebecca let out her breath with a sigh of relief.

The supplies Katy had sequestered in the Sentinel didn’t include tents, but whatever storm Arcade had manufactured seemed to be staying on the other side of the island, so they bedded down under Mylar blankets around the fire as an occasional muted boom of thunder sounded in the distance.

Rebecca shifted under her blanket, watching embers swirl lazily up from the campfire.

“Problem, Rebecca?”

She looked up from her bowl of Cheerios. Her father, at the other side of the kitchen table, was obscured by his newspaper. She smiled. Harlan Ryker: the ‘Prometheus of Modern Cybernetics’—who still preferred to read the morning news on dead trees. She put her spoon down and glanced at her gun arm resting on the table.

“Umm, yeah.” She raised her arm slightly and then let it thump back down. “The aim seems kinda off.”

Her father lowered his paper. “Hmm. Well then, I guess we better see what we can see.”

They weren’t in the kitchen now. She sat at the edge of a gurney in her father’s lab, machines humming and clicking industriously around them. Her gun arm rested on a small rolling table that held the arm elevated just below chest level.

Her father leaned over her elbow, a small electric bit driver in his hand. Rebecca closed her eyes, smelling the familiar woodsy aftershave her mother had helped Rebecca pick out for his birthday. There was a whirring sound and a hiss as clasps came undone on the gun.

“There we go,” Ryker said, sliding the cybernetic cannon off her arm. She looked down, startled to see her normal flesh and blood fore arm protruding from the metallic upper arm.

She remembered lying in this lab, after the Deathlok had killed her mother and brother, after the explosion that left Rebecca near death with half of her body missing. Drifting in and out of consciousness, as her father feverishly grafted cybernetic parts onto her to keep her alive, she had been convinced that she could still feel her flesh and blood arm, even though she could see it was gone. And now here it was again! Her father took the gun arm over to a table and looked back over his shoulder, smiling at her as she gleefully wriggled her fingers.

“Surprised?” he asked. “Don’t forget, Becca, this is all just wires and machinery…you’re still  _ you _ .”

The bit driver whirred as he worked on the metal arm, humming something to himself. Rebecca half-recognized it, some old rock song he liked. She couldn’t remember how it went. As if in answer, she barely heard him murmuring, “Sending out an S.O.S. Sending out an S.O.S.”

After a minute or so, he turned around and brought the gun back to her, now polished and gleaming under the laboratory lights. He slid it over her arm, as if it was a long chrome glove. Clasps snapped close at her elbow and she felt her arm melting into the gun, flesh, muscle and bone turning to metal. She made the gun cycle through configurations with a whirring buzz: pulse rifle, flamethrower, laser cannon.

Rebecca smiled, raising the gun and then pointing it to her side. Her grin faded and she slowly lowered her arm.

One entire wall of her father’s lab was gone. Outside was not the suburban industrial park that should have been there. It was the cliff edge on Murderworld. A biting cold wind blew into the lab and small drifts of snow spilled over the threshold onto the tile floor. The hulk of the broken Sentinel stood inert among the pine trees and once again she saw the small silver robots toiling over Katy’s body before lifting it and floating soundlessly away.

“She made me do stuff,” Rebecca said quietly. “I…I hurt people.”

“That wasn’t your fault, Becca. She took advantage of you, but you aren’t just a weapon.” He clasped her metal shoulder gently. “I hope you can forgive me for what I did to you. I thought it would…I wanted to protect you. When your mother and brother were killed, and I saw what had happened to you… Well, I think I might have gone a little crazy.”

There was a deep, almost subsonic boom that Rebecca felt in her chest. Machinery and glass rattled throughout the lab.

“What was that?” Rebecca asked. Another deep rumble rolled through the room and her father looked up at the swaying fluorescent fixtures.

“Unless I miss my guess,” he said, “It’s morning.”

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, why write an alternate ending to a not-so well known eight year old mini series? I got the idea for the story right after Nico's death in issue ten. I had the first chapter and some of the rest of the plotting done when, two issues later, Nico got resurrected (do people still call that getting Jossed?). That kind of took the wind out my sails, so I set it aside. About a month ago, while digging through a bunch of uncompleted fics and fragments I came across it again and decided to finish it.


End file.
